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I’m sure everyone has heard that line, “Here’s yer sign…” from the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, where a joke just flies over someone’s head and the irony of the situation is almost incomprehensible? Well… I had a “Here’s yer sign…” moment last night.

Remember how I said we were going to ‘steamroll’ Naxx 25 because we’ve had it on farm for heaven knows how long? And remember how I said that I was either going to have a post full of Win or a post full of Fail? Well… even though we’re trying to progress in Ulduar 25, but see to be getting stuck with the same people who are clueless, we still can’t even clear more than one wing in Naxx 25 in two and a half hours.

….Here’s yer sign…

It took me a moment, and as much as I hate to admit it -in which I didn’t want to publicly admit it in front of everyone- but should we really, honestly and truly, be trying to replace Naxx 25 runs with Ulduar 25 runs with the gear level of 60% of the raid barely, just barely, at Ulduar 10 standards??

Last night, granted yes we did have some of our core DPS, healers, and a core tank, but the rest of the group, some composed with a sprinkle of alts, should NOT have taken 2 ½ hours to clear construct wing in Naxx 25.

Let me give you a break down on how this run went.

Patchwerk
This fight, is not hard.

1st Attempt
So far so good, get Patchwerk to 60%… Mikata bites the dust, hateful tank down, tried to Brez, didn’t get it in time, half the raid down, we wipe it.

Mikata only has 38.6k health… arjthgapghap;g And I was a hateful tank because the other alt tank who was tanking the boss only had 35k health.

Thaddius
We spend 20 MINUTES figuring out who is healing, who is tanking, who is DPSing what side, Hunt and Amber argue over recount because Hunt is retarded and needs to be globally muted sometimes, and it’s just OMFG LET GO.

Since Murri can’t prot DPS for shit (like my tank spec feral dps is any better, aisjhgpajg), he’s tanking one of the bosses. They both die, we jump down to Thadd. About 30 seconds in we hear.

Atropus: “Murri… do NOT pull him off me, watch your THREAT!!”
Murri: “Oh, sorry, my bad. I’m in defensive stance.”
Macharious: “Why are you in defensive stance? Switch to zerker stance.”
Murri: “Alright, but I’ll switch back here soon, I get more DPS in defensive stance.”
Macharious: “No the fuck you don’t, stay in zerker stance.”

Thaddius dies.

Keep in mind, between every pull we have to stop or slow down for one reason or another. Someone leaves or someone has to be replaced, or someone has to be globally muted, WTFE. This shit is taking too damn long.

We go to try our hand in the Military Wing.

Instructor Razuvious

1st Attempt
The healers can’t seem to keep the understudies up for shit, and they keep dying. So what happens?

WHY ARE THE ADDS DYING, THE BOSS IS RUNNING AROUND EVERYWHERE, HALF THE RAID IS DEAD, PICK UP AN ADD, TAUNT, BONE ARMOR, OMFG!!!!!!

Everyone dies.

We call it a night.

Yes… a night full of disappointments, Here’s yer sign… that leads me to the conclusion:

How can we expect to make very much progress in Ulduar 25 when we can barely… BARELY handle a raid we’ve had on farm for so long. I’m not sure if it was the lack of focus, or the lack of commitment, but we shouldn’t have had these problems. I get the feeling that most of these new recruits just aren’t taking it seriously. (Yes, I know it’s a game, get the fuck off my back, I don’t like wasting 3 hours of my life for school yard bullshit in a game I play to enjoy.)

I would like to give thanks to Blizzard, for giving me more reason to hate heroics right before my shaman hit 80. Thank you so much for turning all emblem rewards from heroics to conquest badges, SO THAT EVERY FUCKING 80 ON THE SERVER WILL RUN HEROICS ALL AT THE SAME FUCKING TIME!!!!!

Hey Blizz….. L2GetMoreInstanceServers…. kthxbai.

Yesterday on my lovely day off, I spent all day long running heroic after heroic after heroic… Hell… I even DREAMED about running heroics. Even so on top of that, we decided to run Naxx 10 for some easy badges. Took us about 3 1/2 hours for a full clear, and even now tonight, there’s plans in the works for a Naxx 25 to be thrown together with another guild. The only upside is that when I finally finish getting all this gear of mine, I plan on holding off on heroics for a little while before starting the grind all over again.

On to good news, yesterday I finally finished getting together my tanking set for my polar bear. I caught some backlash because I refused to tank without having EVERY little detail perfect, but I had my reasons. Instead of going with a full mitigation or avoidence set, I took a different route that I don’t see too common. I wanted some avoidence stats as well as some mitigation stats. Reason being is that while mitigation tanking is hard to perfect for bears because of STAM and armor nerfs from patch 3.1, avoidence is a percentile tanking method, and RNG can sometimes work against you and you can easily get 2 shotted by a boss with no mitigation.

My current stats for my bear currently hover around a Naxx 25 standard for tanking. I have roughly 30k armor and 36k health 25 man raid buffed, but I’m also sitting pretty at a 40% dodge rating. After running a few heroics last night, I was getting feed back from my healer saying that most of the time, I wasn’t taking big hit all at once, but little hits over time and a renew could keep me topped off. That’s what I was hoping for, ease to heal by healers. I know how it is to keep certain types of tanks up, and I much prefer tanks who can dodge, but also soften those hits.

To boost that mitigation, The Black Heart out of reg ToC gives me a boost of stam, but the pro gives me 7056 armor, boosting my armor close to 40k for a short time. For any bear tanks, that trinket is IDEAL to have. I’m still currently using the dodge trinket from the heroic vendor because the massive amount of dodge on that trinket is amazing.

And now, for the screenshot of the week.

In Naxx 10, I managed 2 feats of strength that I didn’t even realize I was capable of. One of them, I totally forgot to screenshot. On KT, we decided to try for the 10 man Abom achievement in KT chambers. Unfortunately, the holy priest I was healing with, got shotted by skellies because DPS weren’t paying attention. (What’s new?) And at the time, my brez was still on CD for 9 minutes, so I got the lucky task of solo healing KT…. for a short while. When KT for to about 20%, I got iceblocked, and while I was kept alive, I was quickly frostbolted and was shot. Luckily, the prot pally and the shadow priest could heal the tank just enough for that last 20%.

A little earlier in the run, on Instructer Razuvious, we were having a hard time with one of the DPS controlling the adds, when to taunt, boneshield, etc… so we ended up losing one of our add and were promtly instructed to “HEAL THE SHIT OUT OF THE OTHER ADD!!” by the raid leader. Okay… no problem. In the end, we did manage to keep the add healed through the last 80% of Raz’s health, and I looked at meters and LOL’d.

I didn’t even realize 5k HPS was possible. I proudly pumped my chest and giggled to myself, and then was told to shut up and follow the tank for pulls.

It never ceces to amaze me how blizz finds humor in attempting to fix the balance between pure and hybrids DPS at the players expense, almost like punishing the hybrids for being able to coherently play thier class and out DPS that mage that just spams Frostfire Bolt during a boss encounter. They implicate these changes and nerfs to the hybrid DPS, but faintly leave a light at the end of the tunnel to recover some of that lost DPS… by completely regearing your toon for different stats.

With my current kitty gear, I was wearing a few pieces out of heroics, a few pieces out of Naxx 10, and a few pieces out of Naxx 25… and my guild took me to Ulduar 10 wearing such items. I had no 7.5, only T7, and I still had a reletively low gear level for Ulduar, but I managed. With no ArP on any items other than the T7 helm I wore, I managed to hold my own with about 3.5-4k DPS on bosses. Not too horrible in my opinion considering the circumstances.

Well after 3.2 was released, I spoke with several people, and read on serveral sites regarding the overall DPS drop. I’ve been told, depending on gear level, it was between a 7-12% DPS loss because of the patch. Basically Blizz is try to level out where a DPS hybrid can still hold his own, but wanted to shave the top off so that there was a MINIMAL difference between the hybrid and pure class DPS. (Roughly ~ 5%ish give or take depending on gear and player comprehension)

Well it wasn’t very clear to me how giving druids a 7-12% DPS nerf was going to level out anything, if not only just piss us off, but after speaking with a few other players, there’s a couple of theories running around as to why it was such a significant blow to our DPS.

One therory states that they’re trying to level back out the amount the bears to cats. After the major bear nerf in 3.1, a lot of druid bears stopped tanking and went kitty because of the lapse in health and armor they took because of the patch. Well after so many kitty-konverts came forward, there was a lack of druid tanks, and Blizz is making an attempt to bring back a few of those tanks.

Another theory states that, as they did with warriors, Blizz is trying to push kitties more towards an ArP stack gearing style. My first times running ToC, both of the leather items that dropped for DPS both had a massive amounts of ArP on them. Hypothetically speaking, if enough ArP is stacked, you should be able to regain some of that percential DPS loss with roughly between 25-30% armor ignore.

Eventually I’m going to get around to testing the ArP theory, but in the meantime I’m going to continue getting my tanking gear together first and worry about getting my ArP kitty gear together a little later on the side. Unfortunately, both directions of either tanking or ArP is proving to be quite costworthy, and with Steve constantly asking me to heal for his chain heroic addiction, it’s also proving to be very very difficult to make profit to fund these expenses.